Do you take enjoyment in participating in these long, often repetitive arguments?
No.
Do you not find the antagonism consistently grating or stressful?
I do find the antagonism grating and/or stressful. (The same with questions posed in the negative, but I digress.)
If you have been wronged, surely from experience you can see that repeatedly bringing it up is simply not going to change anything.
It’s definitely going to change the cardinality of the set of non-anonymous people who can indepently confirm or disconfirm being on the receiving end of Alicorn’s wisdom, which is what I was mainly hoping for.
To your broader, implied query: I’m between a rock in a hard place. I’ve wanted to point out what a crock Alicorn’s supposed insight on the matter is since her luminosity series (this isn’t the first time she’s posted advice in direct contradiction of how all evidence reveals she handles situations). After about the ~8th article, I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act, so I spoke up.
No, I don’t enjoy becoming LW’s whipping boy every three months. But what can I say—no good deed goes unpunished.
(The same with questions posed in the negative, but I digress.)
This doesn’t work online, but Steve Rayhawk has cultivated the habit of consistently responding to questions in the negative with an affirmative response (‘Yes, I do not believe that’, or simply ‘Yes’) and thus I feel I do not have to sacrifice meaning for ease of conversational flow. I really wish this would become a more common disposition. Anyway, sorry for doing that.
I think you discount the possibility (I have no idea how probable it is, by the way) that Alicorn is actually a generally luminous and thoughtful person and that for some reason you seem to be an especially rare and difficult case for her. Maybe she has legitimate things to say to help people generally, even if she messed up (or you messed up for her) the dynamic between you two specifically. I know Alicorn. She can be critical, but she’s genuinely a good person. It could be that you’ve been wronged, but it could also be that this is an an atypical result for people who interact with Alicorn, as most of the evidence seems to suggest. Generalizing from one example, although it probably feels justified, might actually be the wrong thing to do here. It might be impossible for you, but I’d suggest letting it go. All of the writing time you’ve spent on comments in this thread could have been spent on a good post, which is your strong point. One should generally not spend their time optimizing for cold harshies.
I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not atypical. Looking at the moderation difference between Alicorn and HughRistik regarding her advice here, and the numerous other times she posts dating/meeting friends advice in the comments section (rather than as an article), it seems that most men here aren’t benefitting from what she has to say in their daily lives—though they may certainly find the advice intellectually stimulating.
I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not typical.
Point taken (and I think you meant atypical?). It’s funny, because I know Hugh and I know Alicorn, and I bet they’d make decent friends in person (if they haven’t met already at a Less Wrong meetup while I was on vacation or something). Anyway, your claim here seems way more reasonable than the dramatized ones above. (“I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act”.) It seems you have narrowed your argument specifically to relationship advice, in which case I’m much more tempted to agree that your point has merit. But I think her luminosity sequence got a lot of upvotes for a reason. I personally found some useful concepts in there, and looking at the comments it seems many others also discovered her ideas about luminosity to be useful. First, I don’t think shouting ‘hypocrisy’ is a good argument against the usefulness of a post; second, I don’t think that shouting ‘hypocrisy’, or attempting ad hominem attacks, is going to get you anywhere anyway. If you want to make people think Alicorn is a bad person, fine, but why the heck would you want to do that? Vengeance? It seems you take the more reasonable position that Alicorn might be being trusted as an expert where she lacks skill, but continuing to attack her in areas where skill has been demonstrated erodes Less Wrongers’ ability to believe you are acting in good faith.
No.
I do find the antagonism grating and/or stressful. (The same with questions posed in the negative, but I digress.)
It’s definitely going to change the cardinality of the set of non-anonymous people who can indepently confirm or disconfirm being on the receiving end of Alicorn’s wisdom, which is what I was mainly hoping for.
To your broader, implied query: I’m between a rock in a hard place. I’ve wanted to point out what a crock Alicorn’s supposed insight on the matter is since her luminosity series (this isn’t the first time she’s posted advice in direct contradiction of how all evidence reveals she handles situations). After about the ~8th article, I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act, so I spoke up.
No, I don’t enjoy becoming LW’s whipping boy every three months. But what can I say—no good deed goes unpunished.
This doesn’t work online, but Steve Rayhawk has cultivated the habit of consistently responding to questions in the negative with an affirmative response (‘Yes, I do not believe that’, or simply ‘Yes’) and thus I feel I do not have to sacrifice meaning for ease of conversational flow. I really wish this would become a more common disposition. Anyway, sorry for doing that.
I think you discount the possibility (I have no idea how probable it is, by the way) that Alicorn is actually a generally luminous and thoughtful person and that for some reason you seem to be an especially rare and difficult case for her. Maybe she has legitimate things to say to help people generally, even if she messed up (or you messed up for her) the dynamic between you two specifically. I know Alicorn. She can be critical, but she’s genuinely a good person. It could be that you’ve been wronged, but it could also be that this is an an atypical result for people who interact with Alicorn, as most of the evidence seems to suggest. Generalizing from one example, although it probably feels justified, might actually be the wrong thing to do here. It might be impossible for you, but I’d suggest letting it go. All of the writing time you’ve spent on comments in this thread could have been spent on a good post, which is your strong point. One should generally not spend their time optimizing for cold harshies.
I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not atypical. Looking at the moderation difference between Alicorn and HughRistik regarding her advice here, and the numerous other times she posts dating/meeting friends advice in the comments section (rather than as an article), it seems that most men here aren’t benefitting from what she has to say in their daily lives—though they may certainly find the advice intellectually stimulating.
Point taken (and I think you meant atypical?). It’s funny, because I know Hugh and I know Alicorn, and I bet they’d make decent friends in person (if they haven’t met already at a Less Wrong meetup while I was on vacation or something). Anyway, your claim here seems way more reasonable than the dramatized ones above. (“I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act”.) It seems you have narrowed your argument specifically to relationship advice, in which case I’m much more tempted to agree that your point has merit. But I think her luminosity sequence got a lot of upvotes for a reason. I personally found some useful concepts in there, and looking at the comments it seems many others also discovered her ideas about luminosity to be useful. First, I don’t think shouting ‘hypocrisy’ is a good argument against the usefulness of a post; second, I don’t think that shouting ‘hypocrisy’, or attempting ad hominem attacks, is going to get you anywhere anyway. If you want to make people think Alicorn is a bad person, fine, but why the heck would you want to do that? Vengeance? It seems you take the more reasonable position that Alicorn might be being trusted as an expert where she lacks skill, but continuing to attack her in areas where skill has been demonstrated erodes Less Wrongers’ ability to believe you are acting in good faith.